This is a compulsory study so everyone learns it and the Examiner will expect you to know it in detail. While the Exam could ask general questions about the procedure or evaluation, it could also ask specific questions, like, How did Milgram recruit his sample? or, What explanations did Milgram give for the high level of obedience in the study? or, What made this study ethical (or unethical)? You could also be asked to COMPARE this with another study from a different Approach (for example, Bandura's study of imitated aggression).
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KEY TERMS
Authority Figure Confederate Naive Participant Obedience Observation Prods Shock Generator Volunteer Sample Yale University |
MILGRAM (1963)
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MILGRAM'S STUDY
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MILGRAM'S VARIATIONS
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Child psychologist Diana Baumrind (1964) published a criticism of the ethics of Milgram’s study: she complained that Milgram had ignored the “wellbeing” of the participants, deceiving them and putting them through traumatic stress.
procedures which involve loss of dignity, self-esteem, and trust in rational authority are probably most harmful in the long run - Diana Baumrind |
Milgram (1964b) replied with these points:
- After the end of the study, Milgram debriefed his participants (this is now standard procedure but Milgram was one of the first researchers to do this); he explained the truth to them, introduced them to Mr Wallace (alive and well) and checked that they were in a comfortable mental state.
- 40 participants were interviewed by a psychiatrist a year later and only 2 expressed lasting distress about their part in the study, but they were willing to do it again.
- A questionnaire was sent out to all the participants in all the Variations (see below) and only 1% expressed criticism of the way they had been treated by 84% said they were “glad” or “very glad” to have participated.
- Milgram pointed out that before the study he had approached his own students, colleagues and professional psychiatrists and no one had suspected that obedience would be as high as it turned out
Relatively few subjects experienced greater tension than a nail-biting patron at a good Hitchcock thriller - Stanley Milgram
The American Psychological Association (APA) cleared Milgram of any wrongdoing, but went on to publish the first “Ethical Guidelines” for researchers. These guidelines would make it impossible for Milgram to replicate his studies (however, he had already carried out his Variations by then). Burger (2009) is an example of how Milgram’s study could be replicated while staying within the APA Guidelines.
Milgram died in 1984 after a series of heart attacks. Ironically, if the stress of the studies harmed anyone, it was Milgram himself!
Milgram died in 1984 after a series of heart attacks. Ironically, if the stress of the studies harmed anyone, it was Milgram himself!
I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiments ... that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town - Stanley Milgram (1979 interview)